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Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction

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We would like to propose a new model of meaning construction based on language comprehension considered as a dynamic process during which the meaning of each linguistic unit and the global meaning of the sentence are determined simultaneously. This model, which may be called “gestalt compositionality,” is radically opposed to the classic compositional mechanism advocated by linguistic formalism based on the primacy of syntax. The process considers the syntactic structure of an utterance as the product of meaning construction rather than its source. The comprehension of an utterance is consequently directly based on the interaction between the different basic components of this utterance: lexical units, grammatical markers, positional relations between units, and more generally, basic “constructions” in the sense of Construction Grammar. Thus, meaning is really the result of a gestalt compositional process insomuch as the contribution of each basic component depends on the contribution of the other components present in the utterance. We show a first attempt at modeling from French and English examples.

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Notes

  1. “Representation” is understood not in the sense usually encountered in cognitive science, but in its original latin etymom: repraesentare—to make present.

  2. “Find”, “room,” and “background” may not actually be that polysemous in English.

  3. A detailed discussion that notably takes into account solutions based on mechanisms of recategorization is to be found in Fuchs et al. (1991).

  4. We agree on this point with Benveniste (1966: 123–124): “a sentence is a whole which is not reducible to the sum of its parts; the meaning inherent in this whole is distributed over the entire components. A word is a component of a sentence, it is part of its meaning but it is not present in the sentence with the meaning it has as an independent unit.”

  5. The term “instructional grammar” used here is different from the one used in language teaching by Delbart (2007) for whom the structural mechanism of a language give instructions leading to binary answers in “yes” or “no”.

  6. The distinction between “entity” and “process” is close to Langacker’s (1987) between “things” and “process,” and it encompasses a lack of temporal profile for the former and a non-zero temporal profile for the latter.

  7. See the following part for detailed analysis of examples in French and in English.

  8. “When we talk about the notion we are talking about a set that we can express, for example by ‘lire; lecture; livre; lecteur; bibliothèque; etc.’ [‘read, reading, book, reader, library etc.’], which is to say that things cannot be reduced to a lexical unit: the unit merely serves as an introduction, a first step […]. The problem is that the notion is something virtual and productive. It is not given once and for all in each meaning and that is why it cannot correspond to a lexical unit. It is a generator of lexical units; it defines a class of linked operations. It designates.” (Culioli 1990: 53–54).

  9. See further down this paragraph details about the notion of pinpointing and more generally about the role of metalinguistic operations.

  10. The capital letter indicates an entity and not a “notion of entity,” and “n” indicates that this entity comes from a notion.

  11. Up to here, our work has focused on simple utterances, in order to set up our methodology and formalization. We have nevertheless tackled the topic of subordination through the question of focalization in Col (2011), without going deeper into the question.

  12. What interrupts the unfolding of the scene here is the combination of a WHEN time clause, whose verb in the preterit tense describes the completion of a process, and of a main clause whose process is described imperfectively. With such an utterance, we actually cannot decide wether the train left the station or not, as the speaker only shows the beginning of the unfolding of the first process on the scene.

  13. See Culioli (1995: 34): “[notions] are complex representational systems of physico-cultural properties, that is to say, properties of objects resulting from manipulations necessarily a part of cultures, and from this point of view, examining notions inevitably implies speaking of problems of the province of disciplines that cannot be reduced solely to linguistics.”

  14. As we shall see in the present perfect analysis, the global analysis for the «ai vu» sequence could be divided up into more steps.

  15. The exact nature of this extraction operation that consists in building an occurrence from a notion explains why the most common use of un is to introduce a new entity, even if the generic uses are not excluded, as in Un Alsacien, ça mange de la choucroute (an alsacian (=any alsacian) simply will eat choucroute).

  16. Since an entity E1 corresponding to the speaker is already present on the scene.

  17. We have chosen to analyze a rather simple example with no complex nominal syntagm. The presence of an adjective in a nominal clause implies combining the instruction provided by the noun and the instruction provided by the adjective, the definition of which depends on the kind of adjective, its position, its reach, etc. This work is very complex and has still to be done.

  18. We ought to say that such a stabilization is quite relative, since the meaning of the words pièce and tableau can vary under different enunciation conditions. A context in which the word pièce referring to drama is totally possible, with tableau keeping its several possible acceptations. In such a case, dans would get a temporal meaning, which is allowed by its schematic form.

  19. See Col (2001) for a detailed presentation of the schematic form of already, from a topological point of view and in relation to the construction of the verbal scene.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FoReLL, E.A. 3816, MSHS, Université de Poitiers/CNRS, 5 Rue Theodore Lefebvre, 86000, Poitiers, France

    Gilles Col

  2. LaTTiCe, CNRS-ENS Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1 Rue Maurice Arnoux, 92120, Montrouge, France

    Jeanne Aptekman, Stéphanie Girault & Thierry Poibeau

  3. 2 Impasse de la Trinité, 86000, Poitiers, France

    Gilles Col

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  1. Gilles Col
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  2. Jeanne Aptekman
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Correspondence to Gilles Col.

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Col, G., Aptekman, J., Girault, S. et al. Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction. Cogn Process 13, 151–170 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0431-y

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